


Gravity

by galacticproportions



Series: Laws of Motion [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Injury, Liberation in the galaxy, M/M, Slow Burn, Vomiting, also blowjobs, collective action
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-09-12 16:17:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9080131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Finn left the Resistance thirteen years ago, only to become part of another movement resisting all forms of tyranny. Poe goes looking for the leaders of that movement on purpose, and finds Finn by accident. The two of them have to decide whether and how to work together for the freedom of the galaxy.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gloss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/gifts).



> This story--one of a two-part series--arose out of an ongoing and ever-evolving conversation with my friend Gloss about what a free life would feel like, and how to build it, and how to live it. This is more of the "how to build it" part, and the next bit will be the "how to live it" part, though the two are and must be intertwined.
> 
> Although I'm posting this, and will post the next part when it's ready, I don't consider this a finished work--that is, I want to hear from you all what else it could be, what I'm forgetting or ignoring, what seems implausible or shortcuttish or lazy, and what could make this a more possible, livable version of the galaxy far far away. One of my favorite writers (besides Gloss) reminded me a while ago that knowledge is something we make together, by making mistakes and correcting each other and listening to each other and letting go of what we thought we knew in order to know more, or know differently. This is what I can imagine--what can you imagine?

_Day 0_

 

The eject function works exactly as it's supposed to, flings him clear, he tries to tuck his limbs but the wind's tearing him away from himself and his inner ear's at least three meters behind and trying to catch up, and Poe heaves and falls, heaves and falls, until his harness nearly jerks his guts out of him as the parachute deploys. He sinks slowly now, has time to realize that some of his vomit fell on him, or he fell through it, and that something is very wrong with one side of his body, but he's shaking too much to feel what it might be. He sinks and sinks and sinks, and the trees—it would be trees, but at least it's not water—take on definition and then become shadows again as they rise up around him.

The smell of the forest floor when he lands has a dry tang to it, and he tries to roll so that his hurt side isn't pressed into the leaf litter. His ears are pressure-clogged, which may explain why he doesn't hear the footsteps.

His eyes are blurred with tears—just the wind, just the wind of falling—and all he can see is that they're bipedal and vaguely human-sized. One reaches for his upper arm and the pain makes him throw up again, near the feet of the other one. It must be the pain and the disorientation and the fall that makes him think the one who grabbed his arm is saying to the other one, “Go get Finn,” because they couldn't possibly be saying that.

And Poe knows for sure he's hallucinating, or maybe dying, when the swimmy grayness gathers and takes on warmth and richness and life, forming a face he never thought he'd see again. The tears seep from his eyes and he can't blame them on the wind this time.

He drifts in and out, no more to consciousness than a flash of pain, a fuzz of light, someone moving his left leg around, something wet over his lips. Until there's more light that resolves and settles into shapes, a yellow bowl, a pair of boots, a couple of crates. A man sitting cross-legged on the ground, patches on the knees of his trousers, frowning at a datapad. The light, from a hole in the roof, catches little threads of gray in his cropped hair, traces his profile gently as a fingertip.

Poe didn't realize he'd made a sound, but he must have, because Finn looks up and says, “You're awake, huh? Can you talk?”

“Yeah,” Poe says, his voice rough and hollow but there on command. “I think so.”

He searches Finn's face for any trace of warmth, of pleasure, of any of the things he himself expected to feel if they ever saw each other again. He sees only gravity, an expression folded back into itself, giving nothing.

There's a rustle, and two people enter the room, or hut, or whatever it is; Finn stands to greet them. Stocky, contained people, dressed similarly to Finn in no-color jackets and trousers, visibly mended even in the filtered light. It's clear from their tone that they're making reports, but he can't focus enough to follow what they're saying. One of them darts a wary glance at him and Finn says, “Yeah, he's awake, but it's fine, go ahead,” and the voice goes on and on. Poe catches numbers, what sounds like place names, something about a weapons cache, something about food distribution. When Finn says, “Nice work,” Poe can hear the smile in their, “Thank you.”

They leave again. Finn squats down by the cot that Poe has figured out he's on. That expression of weary reserve remains, and Poe can't stand to watch his eyes, focuses on the parting of Finn's perfect lips as he says, “What'd you think you were doing here?”

“Well,” Poe says, “in a way, I was looking for you.”

 

 

_Thirteen years earlier_

 

While the Resistance regrouped and the remnants of the Republic reached out a conciliatory hand and the First Order retreated to lick its wounds, Finn healed and gained strength and volunteered information and made friends. He shadowed medics and tacticians and engineers and gardeners, and spent so much time with the quartermaster that they gave him his own chair. He exercised with the ground troops and ate in the pilots' mess, and he slept in Poe Dameron's room whether Poe was there or not.

Poe was there a lot, around that time. Reconnaissance didn't require his particular aptitudes in flight, and the panic attacks were getting less frequent but they still got in the way of undercover work. So between mindhealing sessions and collating the information his squadrons brought back, he had time to help Finn practice walking, to spot him in the training rooms, to stay up late talking history and politics when neither of them could sleep.

All of this suited Finn down to the ground. He liked being able to glance at Poe for a cue when he encountered a situation or a concept that was new to him; he liked their frank post-mortems of conversations or encounters as Finn found his way around. He liked the way _time_ went with Poe, how when they talked—Poe talked with his whole body, his gestures shaking the bed they were both sitting on or slicing the wind that blew past them at the edge of the water—they each built on or dodged around or dove into what the other was saying, and then all of a sudden it was dark, or light.

Everyone, including Poe, talked to him and about him as if he were staying. Finn himself assumed he'd stay. But then a ship of stormtrooper defectors arrived on D'Qar, stinking of poorly recycled air and panting with news of a mounting First Order offensive-- “They know your coordinates, how do you think we got here--” and the base mobilized for evacuation. Going back to carry another crate of ration bars and turnips from storehouse to transport, Finn looked at the exhausted faces above the white armor and made a decision.

“But you can't,” Poe said blankly, freezing mid-stoop over the duffel he was cramming things into.

“I can't fight,” Finn said. “I don't want—I'm done fighting. I'm done killing people, and that's what I'll end up doing if I stay.”

“But everything you've been doing here for us, the debriefing, the intel--”

“I know it's all part of the same thing,” Finn said. “I'm not stupid, Poe.” He'd been fooling himself, though, which meant he was stupid, maybe. The days while he was healing had just felt so much like peace.

“I didn't fucking—okay.” The effort it took for Poe to still himself seemed to take all the rest of the sound from the room. “It's your life,” Poe said. “You do what you want with it. That cohort of civilian engineers is taking off at 0450, you'll go with them?”

“That's what I was thinking.” He wanted to say _Don't hate me,_ but he knew it wasn't like that, wasn't personal. That was the problem. Everything he'd done so far, even the violent things, was personal—defending Rey, defending himself, dealing with situations as they came up. He was a good planner, but he couldn't plan to kill someone. He wanted to tell Poe this, to hear his challenges and questions and respond to them—to talk about this, like they talked about everything, until what they knew together was more than what they knew alone.

Until he was sitting upright and miserable on a crate in the belly of a freighter, halfway to a world in a far sector of the Outer Rim, he didn't understand that what he'd really wanted was for Poe to talk him out of it. He thumped his clenched fist hard on his thigh. His life, his decisions, his responsibility. He'd never again ask anyone to do anything he wouldn't do himself.

 

 

_Day 1_

 

“So how'd you get from that to being the Messenger?” Poe asks.

“ _A_ Messenger.”

“Right, that makes sense, we did think of that. I won't ask you how many of you there are, because you wouldn't tell me, and why should you?” He's lightheaded, rambling. Maybe it's whatever they gave him for the pain, which seems to be hovering just over his left-side ribs at the moment, ready to sink back and become part of him.

“Everyone who works with us can call themselves a Messenger,” Finn says, “but there are about eighteen of us who do what I do. I'm not gonna tell you _who_ they are. Or where. Obviously. Anyway, I got off at Btzani with the engineers. It's a shipbuilding world, and there wasn't a lot for me to do but carry stuff. I did learn how to use a laser torch, but I thought I should probably keep moving. So I worked passage on a craft carrier that was taking some of the ships to Uis Terech, and I worked for their municipal water service there—actually I helped them revamp it--”

“Of course you did,” Poe says faintly.

“--and after Uis Terech I went a bunch of places, did a few things. I couldn't seem to settle anywhere, and I was always looking over my shoulder, so I tried to just—look at what was in front of me, instead. What people were doing, how they were living. Asked a lot of questions. There are a lot of ways to be like the First Order, I found out, but there are also—other ways to be. And I read some, too, especially when I was in jail.”

“ _You_ were in jail.”

“Just awaiting trial for some smuggling I didn't know was happening, on a ship I wasn't supposed to be on. But it took a long time, almost a standard year, and I met a few people there, and one of them was from a world where people—I almost didn't believe them, when they told me about it.” Finn stops. “I'm talking a lot,” he says. “You should rest.”

“I want to know. I mean. If you think it's safe for you to tell me.”

“Sure. I mean, of course it's safe to talk about the past. Nobody can do anything new to us, back there. But later. And you still need to tell me why you wanted to find us.” But his tone when he says it is warmer than before, as if talking had loosened something inside him.

If Poe talks about the past, he'll talk about that last day, suiting up while he watched Finn walk up the ramp of the transport, shoulders set in Poe's old jacket. He'll talk about the moment a few hours before, when Finn turned to leave their room. How angry he was and how anger made him want to be cruel, and how he bit it back, bit back everything, held his arms rigid to his sides and his head rigid on his neck and didn't curse at Finn and didn't touch him.

He'll talk about the battles on the edge of old Imperial space, the casualties; he'll talk about the financial negotiations with Hosnian refugees, the ones who survived because they were rich enough to be summering or wintering on other worlds entirely. He'll tell Finn what he must surely know: that after Rey and Luke Skywalker killed Snoke and brought Kylo Ren to his knees, the First Order didn't flag but redoubled its efforts to maintain control of the galaxy. How the Resistance has been holding the line, but just barely, until recently.

It isn't safe to talk about the past; just thinking about talking about it makes Poe feel like he's going to pass out.

“This is our hospital,” Finn's saying. “You can stay here as long as you need to. Somebody'll come in and check your bandages, probably, they always do that to me. I don't know if you can get up yet, but there's a pot to piss in over here, and a water jug over here. Don't mix them up.” Definitely, definitely a touch of warmth there, a vestige of their former back-and-forth, that Poe sniffs after like an elusive scent on the air and clings to in his mind after Finn lifts the hanging doorway curtain and heads out.

 

 

_Ten years earlier_

 

Kabelay was very old for a Dobna. Their people were small compared to Finn, hip height, and short-lived—the two of them had been in the world for about the same time, but even if nothing happened to Kabelay they probably had about two more standard years. It was fairly likely that something would happen to them. They were in jail for theft and addicted to ghele, which they smuggled into the jail and rubbed on their gums, and Finn massaged their cramping feet for them. In return, before morning count and after lights-out, they told him stories.

On Dobna Kom, “the peoples' home,” they said it meant in Basic, people worked for each other, and no one retained the ability to order anyone else around for very long. They gave it up voluntarily, or else other people hassled them out of it. There were plenty of fights, but few bullies; everyone ate the same amount of food. Any kind of change was slow, Kabelay said, and involved a lot of bickering—they remembered when an entire underground city flooded out because the people there couldn't come to a consensus about how to dig the drainage tunnels. And their knowledge of history was deep: they told stories back to the oldest generations, when memory wasn't memory but something else, and they lived in different ways on a different world that dried up. “Wherever Dobna live, if there's enough of us, and if we tell the stories, it's Dobna Kom.”

Finn had never had ancestors. Even the Order that tried to be everything to him, while he was nothing to it, was no more than a generation old. While he and Kabelay were still in jail, pinching their body lice to death and rubbing work-broken nails smooth on the stones of the floor, the stories of heritage and generations were the stories he liked the best. But the others curled inside him, emerging to combine with the leaflets he found behind a loose stone in the walls, and a packet of scriptures from a cult he'd never heard of, and a collection of conversations with a militant rebel from the Empire's first days, and a painstaking transcription of a dissenting opinion in one of his cellmates' cases that the man carried around like a talisman. He fought that same guy, too, over something so small he'd already forgotten it by the time he was pressing his swollen eye and jaw against a cool spot on the wall of his cell. The guy wasn't much damaged—those two punches were the only ones he got in before Finn's training kicked and immobilized him painfully but not permanently.

Later still he found out that Kabelay had framed him, sicced the guy on him in exchange for a delivery of ghele. But it didn't matter. When they finally dropped the case and he left the jail and then the moon, the stories came with him.

They didn't all agree, and he didn't agree with all of them. But among them, in his mind, as he put them together and argued with them on the long cargo runs between Outer Rim worlds and the long work shifts when he found a place to rest, they began to build a kind of plan, a pattern, for a way of living. One where no one died for anyone else's bad reasons. One where people's need for each other was a feature, not a bug. One where being tender wouldn't kill you, where gentleness and joy were possible. One worth fighting for.

The stories came with him to Vuresse 3, where they met the stories that a group of indentured techs were telling about their owner-employers, leading to a mass slicing of the planet's power grid and a violent crackdown, where Finn killed someone after all, two people. He threw up for hours after. That year ended up being more horrible than he had imagined, partly because he hadn't imagined it very well—the techs had insisted on making their move before enough people were with them, and they'd overestimated the support they'd have when things got bad. They'd remembered to guard the granaries and the algae tanks but not the farms themselves, and the food dole that had looked so fair and so efficient in Finn's mind and his conversations with the tech movement's leaders turned out to scale up really poorly.

No one had starved in the Order. It was was one of the cautionary tales, the symptoms of decadence and disorder: the Republic lets people _starve._ They'd showed holos of children with dull eyes, swollen bellies and bleached-out hair, juxtaposed with images of healthy and shining first-year cadets. Finn had spent a good chunk of his time on D'Qar trying to sort out which elements of First Order propaganda had been real; he knew that people could die of hunger, or be permanently changed by it. But he hadn't seen it, felt it: how his decisions got bad, how he couldn't focus, how everyone around him was the same way, listless and irritable and distractable, how their commitment to acting in each other's interests wavered and eroded with nothing, literally, to feed on.

 _Okay,_ he thought, one night when Okpeki had looted a crate of dried fruit from some basement or other and he was thinking clearly for the first time in a few days. _You can learn from this, but when you don't learn fast enough, people die, so maybe try to learn a little faster._

After a year of hard fighting with few pauses and a deep rift forming in the coalition of planners, they told him they wanted him out, and he left, left again. But Yetta came with him—a creche worker, she'd been, before the power went out, good at managing groups of people and an able fighter and another long-range planner. It was good to have someone to think with again. The first real meal on board the freighter out—no matter who was fighting who, it seemed like money and material kept moving, and maybe they should think a little more about that—he cried into his soup.

“I'll tell you what we fucked up,” Yetta said to him as they sat with their backs against the hum of the engine-room door. “We didn't have anything to jump to. It's not enough to have an idea of what it _should_ be, you have to make it before you even start.”

“But how do you do that,” Finn said, with maybe a little less urgency than it warranted. He was drugged by soup and warmth and vibration, by the absence of adrenaline.

“Gotta see what's already there. Start with that. We listened to the techs, which was right, and we had some input from people like me, but we didn't look around enough at the other castes. Especially the Unseen. I would've expected better from you, Finn, honestly, knowing where you come from. But I would've expected better from me, too, I guess.”

He accepted it. He accepted everything for a while after that, just going along, working to live, leaning on Yetta when he had to and letting her lean on him. Taking things in, until the part of his mind that liked to know how and why and what to do about it woke up again.

 

 

_Days 2-5_

 

For the first two days, Poe's in too much pain to be restless. Someone does come in and change his bandages, a round-faced kid with a Dandoranian accent so like Pava's that he feels his eyes starting to leak again. She's striving for briskness, he can tell, and he kids around with her a little to make her job easier.

The blowout and the fire between them, she says, made a mess of his flank and thigh and the side of his face and head, but as long as they can keep infection at bay he'll be fine. Poe, who has established that the hospital floor is made of dirt, tells her he's sure he's in good hands with her, and she blushes bright red across her cheekbones and the bridge of her delicate nose.

He wonders what she's doing here, if they're anywhere near Dandoran or if she's heard of the Messengers and thrown in her lot with them out of idealism. Not that different from him, years ago. Not that different from all of them, the first batch, following General Organa out of the Fleet and into the void: no backing, no status, no name even. _The Resistance,_ the name of it, grew out of exhausted not-jokes at the end of strategy briefings: _At least we can say we put up some resistance._ All of a sudden that's what they were calling themselves.

The second batch weren't idealists. They were refugees, defectors, people with nothing left to lose. They've fought hard with the Resistance, sometimes desperately, taking on the missions that get labeled “suicide.” And some of them even come back, only to go out again, driving themselves hard, giving everything they have left because what they have left doesn't matter to them very much.

Maybe that's who these people are, Finn's people. He doesn't have much of a chance to find out while he's still laid up, and as the pain recedes a little bit he has room to be reminded exactly why he hates being laid up: he doesn't know what's going on, and Poe _hates_ not knowing what's going on. He doesn't even know the name of the world they're on, and fuck, he should at least let the General know he's alive, and what—and who—he found. _General, Finn's alive, you remember Finn? Our escaped ex-stormtrooper, the Force-sensitive one, the one your son almost took out? The one you had such hopes for? The one who got away? Now he's aiding the oppressed and downtrodden all around the Outer Rim, doing us a favor._

They heard the first whispers of the Messengers about six years ago, conflicting and garbled. It wasn't clear how seriously to take them—were these the kinds of gang wars and petty sector squabbles that periodically flared up along the Outer Rim? It didn't seem like the First Order's style, but could this be part of some long-range plan? But a pattern started to emerge, as the Resistance darted and swung and retreated, as they lost ships and people, as Rey and Skywalker tried to bring the Knights of Ren to a crisis while the rest of the Resistance tried to tackle the rest of the First Order, no spooky Force shit necessary.

Poe thinks of it as little flares of light that catch and hold: a world, a sector, a people choosing their own path. The paths were different, that's what threw their analysts off at first—sometimes an army casting down its weapons, sometimes a violent uprising, sometimes a sudden abdication. And stormtrooper defectors to the Resistance mentioning, just in passing, stormtrooper defectors to something else, something distant, something on the edge of possibility.

At first it didn't have much of a bearing on their fight, closer to the heart of the galaxy. But the strategy team seemed to think that it was worth investigating, worth negotiating, maybe, with the Messenger, or Messengers. A potential ally. Someone who could, apparently, do things they couldn't.

Poe was the obvious man for the job: he knew how to fly fast and he knew how to ask good questions. He followed hints and rumors around the disk of the galaxy and they led him to this sector, this hut of canvas and mud and saplings, this bed, this fog of pain, this situation he _needs_ to understand but can't understand because he hurts too much and no one will talk to him.

That's not exactly true. Finn comes in every day, sometimes twice a day. Sits with him a minute, doesn't stay long or say much, makes calculations or notes or whatever on that busted-up datapad. Asks how he's feeling, listens to the answer. And on the fifth day, when Serengeva the medic says he should try to walk a little, Finn is the one who brings him to their decidedly jury-rigged comms array and tells him to knock himself out. “It's a three-step process off a satellite around Astahkhar and one around Ule,” Finn says. “You should be all good, if you use a cipher.”

“When will it get there?”

“Three of our days, give or take. Actually getting you out of here is gonna be harder. We only have one craft with lightspeed capability, and a couple other people are out in it, and they're not due back for at least twelve local days.” He shrugs. “While you're here, you can make yourself useful. See Darapar, she's keeping the task roster, tell her what you can do and what you can't do.”

“I can't do much,” Poe says wryly. “You don't have anything for me to fly. I could join the infiltration team, I guess.”

“There's a lot to do,” Finn says, apparently refusing to recognize this for the joke it is. “You modified BB-8, didn't you, back in the day? We don't have that many droids up here, but we have some other things with programming maybe you could take a look at.” He looks stricken all of a sudden. “BB-8, they weren't--”

“No,” Poe says, perversely glad to see an emotion, any kind, on Finn's face. “They didn't come out with me this time. They're flying with Bastian, his astromech got taken out in his last dogfight. I was solo, probably why I ran into trouble, but I'm glad they weren't here to go down with me. Can I send that comm now?”

He runs over the latest cipher in his mind and encrypts as he goes: _Found desired contact. Kind of a big deal. No transport at least—_ he does a little mental math and finds that he _can_ do it, there's something to be said for rationing the painkillers— _14 Standard from transmit date. Coordinates unavailable. Will alert projected return._ By the time he's done, he's sweating and dizzy, and he leans on Finn all the way back to his bed, grateful for and agonized by Finn's strong arm and steady pace and quick, “Rest up.” Desired contact. Shit.

 

 

_Eight years earlier_

 

What really shifted things for him was the trip to Adeio. Finn and Yetta went because that's where the _Springhummer_ was going, getting them out of an ugly situation involving bricks of spice disguised as regular bricks and Yetta's suddenly-ex-girlfriend. The yawning crew of Shozers and a couple humans couldn't tell them much about Adeio except that someone there wanted the medical supplies they were carrying. “Oh yeah, and the way they pay is weird,” said Gwer, the copilot. “They'll do all the ship maintenance or they'll stock you up with supplies or, like, they've paid some of us in sex on a couple runs, but they don't use credits. Also they laugh at things that aren't funny.”

The Adoi were chatty, greyish-brown-skinned, bipedal and a little hairier overall than most humans. They helped unload the cargo and began prying at the hull to look for loose plates and shaky connections, but didn't seem in any particular hurry about it. They paused often and they did seem to laugh a lot; on one of their breaks they pulled out balls of grain and meat scraps wrapped in leaves, and shared them with the crew.

One called Istra handed Finn a bowl and he drank from it. Warm sulfurous water, which he almost spit out, but caught himself in time. When he got it down, he asked, “Is it true you don't use credits? Money?”

“We don't use it.”

“How come?” said Yetta, getting interested.

“We burned it,” Istra said. A group of Adoi standing by overheard her and cracked up. “We burned a lot of things,” Istra said, and joined the laughter. “It's really our mothers' mothers who burned them,” said another person whose name Finn hadn't caught. “They knew too much! They burned down the watchtowers, and they burned all the lists.”

“Lists?”

“Of people who had to die,” Marchu explained. “Do you want to stay and hear the story?”

They stayed for an entire season, long after the _Springhummer_ took off spruce and shining, long enough for Finn to learn about life on Adeio two and three generations back—a handful of warlords and their servants, and everyone else breaking their backs in the vanadium and corundum mines just to keep alive—and the mothers, the whisperers, who met underground until they were ready to burst out of the earth in flame.

“The mines were bad, but they helped too,” Marchu explained, pulling roasted grubs from a stick and feeding them to Finn one by one. “You know, being in the ground. Because there's food in the ground, like these, and the ground keeps secrets really well. They killed all the warlords—and some of the servants too, that part was bad, my mother's mother told me.”

“Because the warlords killed so many of them?”

“No!” Everyone looked shocked. “Because the warlords _could_ kill them,” Amran corrected. “So many, so many. Someone like that, they'll just keep going. Why would they stop? You have to know when to stop.”

“Do you still have the mines?” Finn asked dryly. Gwer had told him they sometimes “paid” in vanadium.

“We just take a little.” Marchu laughed uproariously—Finn still didn't really get Adoi humor—and nuzzled Finn's neck. The Adoi mostly had sex in exchange for other things (“You don't have anything we want!” Amran had said, surprised) but they liked to caress and be close.

They drove him nuts sometimes—everything was so _inefficient,_ so slow, so full of pauses. Finn would catch himself getting impatient, wanting to interject what a long-winded elder was _clearly_ trying to say, to just fucking _assign shifts_ to the reconstruction of the bathhouses already. It seemed like all they did was take breaks—to laugh, to drink, to snuggle, to scratch. Things got done, somehow, but they could've gotten done so much _faster._

“Finn,” Istra said to him one day when they were out in the country and taking a break from the harvest, “you ask a lot of questions.”

“I like to know how things work.”

Istra stroked his calf with her foot. “But you want to know if it can work somewhere else. Don't you?”

He did. He learned all he could from them: the stages of the transition, the systems they took over (manufacturing, communications, infrastructure), the ones they dismantled (mostly prisons, a couple of industries), the ones they had to build (the farms “were stupid” and the medical system was set up only to accommodate the much smaller upper classes). The storehouses of smuggled-in food, down in the mines, and the mold that got into one of them and killed almost a hundred people. The respect the whisperers commanded, how they'd been delivering babies and settling disputes for years before they started.

They'd had some good luck with how consolidated the power was, and had the shelter of the mines. But they'd laid good groundwork, too and they knew their people. “How did they get the idea?” he asked once, and Marchu just shrugged. “They watched?” he said. “They listened? Or maybe someone told them, a traveler, like you, who knows? That's not part of the story.” He looked at Finn slyly over his whiskers.

When Finn and Yetta left, Istra went with them. “Why not?” she said. “We tell how it happened to anyone who asks. But maybe we should give them more chances to ask.”

On the next freighter out, bound for Rannon, they talked about the things that wouldn't transfer. A more built-up environment, or a power structure that wasn't decided by combat, or a larger population would all need different approaches. The Adoi killed children and adults too sick or injured to do “what people do”--people who didn't have full use of their legs or hands, mostly, or people with a severe breathing problem that some Adoi developed as children. “It's kinder,” Istra started out by saying, “they can't give, they can only take, it's a shame for them.” She and Yetta had long, bitter fights about it that dragged in the _Arabel's_ crew and included the copilot doubling up her prosthetic fist and holding it an inch from Istra's nose, and ended with Bol, the muscle and accountant, promising earnestly to bring their message to all the worlds the _Arabel_ visited.

Finn lay awake making endless lists in his head of all the ways that could go wrong, and all the things he had to make sure Bol knew before trying—trying what? Was there a single thing here that they were trying to do? Next morning, when they were unloading, he asked Bol, “What is it you're gonna tell them?”

Bol blinked both sets of eyelids, thinking. “I guess first I _ask_ 'em,” he said. “Right? And then I say, well, who's keeping you from doing that? That thing you wanna do? And then I tell 'em what we talked about, making sure you don't need anything from those people, or that thing. And then I ask if they wanna do that.” He shook his heavy head. “I might have to stay a while and work a different run,” he said. “It's gonna take a while to talk about all that. My kids'll be pissed.”

Finn was oddly cheered by this. And on Rannon, he found seven ex-troopers waiting for him with stories about _him_ , saying impatiently, “Don't tell us what to do. Show us how to _know_ what to do.”

They knew who he was. No one had, in a long time.

It wasn't the same as being reminded of himself the way his Resistance friends had once reminded him—through laughing, through touch, through matching their gaits as they walked or asking about his state of mind, through telling stories back to him that he'd told on himself (“Hey, Big Deal!”). It wasn't even the same, quite, as being part of his unit again, that sense of unquestioning belonging, of knowing what was right to do—even though that sense had gotten rarer and rarer for him toward the end, before he ever wiped Slip's blood from his helmet or saw Poe's face.

But they knew the name he'd chosen for himself, and they knew what he had done. And they knew who he had been before, reactive, compliant, nameless.

He didn't send them back to that, exactly. They wanted to go; that was why they came to him, to figure out how best to do it. In long, slow conversations, interrupted by their shifts at work or fits of illness or just bad days, he drew out what they already knew, and helped them see how the pieces fit together. Helped them plan, helped them choose. “It gets easier,” he told them. “Promise.”

Finn never found out what happened to them, but a few standard months later, cleaning a spaceport hangar, he learned that the crew of the _Adamant_ had mutinied, and wondered.

 

 

_Day 6_

 

“I always thought that might be you,” Poe says. He's sitting in the sun with Finn, the stick he's using still to walk—the fall didn't break any bones, but there's joint and tendon damage in addition to the burns—leaning against his good thigh. They're shelling beans. “Even though you said you didn't want to fight, I just sort of wondered.”

“It wasn't me, really, it was them. That's part of how it works. It's _most_ of how it works. It was a little bit about the idea of me, I think that helped them, and a little bit of what I knew that they hadn't thought of. But for some people the idea of us doesn't seem to matter much at all. What made you think it was me?”

“I dunno. Stormtroopers.” Poe shrugs, thumbs another pod open with his good hand. “Maybe I just _wanted_ it to be you. When you left, I figured I'd probably never know what happened to you. You'd disappear, that was what you wanted, you wanted to just be yourself somewhere, not—I mean, I got it. I didn't really get it, but I got it.”

Finn exhales. “You know, I didn't even think of that,” he says. “I had it a little easier. When there'd be news of a battle over the holonet, or just people talking about it in a bar, I could be pretty sure if you were in it or not from how they talked about it, and I'd know that you were still alive. Sometimes there was even visual, and I'd see Black One. And then once we got a little more organized, we started keeping tabs on what the Resistance was doing, because if you were taking care of the First Order it freed us up to concentrate on the other stuff.” There's a bowl of beans now, and a pile of shells. Finn picks them up: “Lemme take these over to the cooking crew.”

Everyone in the camp works. A few stick to one task, based on their abilities, but most rotate. There's down time, but not much of it. Finn and his—cadre? Cohort? Cell? They don't appear to name themselves particularly—are here to infiltrate, to sow possibility, but they've been here long enough to also sow food plants and harvest them. The seat of government is far away, seven days' journey by planetary shuttle, a safe distance for now; the city they're working on is a smaller industrial one called Yeon, three days out, and they have some dealings with the village nestled between this hill and the next, about a day away by foot.

The villagers know they're hiding out, but they have no particular love for the planetary government, with its habit of bringing heavy agricultural pressure and conscription gangs for the security forces.The camp's been here long enough to build a little school here in the woods, and some of the children come up from town to learn. “It's a risk,” Finn admits, coming back with the bowl, full of roots to peel this time; he hands Poe a knife. “But Yetta said we should give it a shot, and no pitchforks and torches so far. And the kids like it.”

Poe's met Yetta, big and blue, roughly second-in-command, who radiates confidence and calm; he's also hobbled over and met the kids, who were thrilled to meet a _real_ X-wing pilot, camp kids and town kids alike. He let them try on his helmet, which someone thoughtfully salvaged from the crash. They salvaged the rest of the wreckage too: parts of Black One are now sluicing rainwater, forming part of a mini greenhouse, jerry-rigging a miniature still. “Estetty might be able to rig one of the fuel cells up for an autoclave,” Finn said. “It's hard to sterilize stuff here, and when it comes to fighting and people come in wounded, it'd be nice to have clean instruments for them.”

 _When_ it comes to fighting. Poe shivers. This isn't the man he said a stiff goodbye to thirteen years ago. But then he hasn't exactly stayed the same himself. “Are any of 'em yours?” he asks, hoping he sounds casual.

“The instruments?”

“The kids.”

“They're theirs,” Finn says, “but if you mean did I help make any of 'em, no, I didn't. I haven't been with anyone who could do that.”

“But you're with someone?”

“I was. Three years. He died.”

“Tell me about him,” Poe says, looking very hard at the thin streamer of peel coming away from the root. He's watching his hands, and when he glances up for a second he sees that Finn is too.

“Ayere,” Finn says and is silent for a moment. “He was quiet. Solid. Always calm. It made him a _great_ Messenger, because he said so few things, every time he said something people figured it must be really serious. He met me before he knew what I did, but he became part of it too. He was _measured,_ he always meant what he said.” He brushes peel scraps off the knees of his pants like he's brushing away tears. “You're making me miss him. What about you, do you--”

“Not so much,” Poe says. “You know how pilots are, we take care of each other. But there aren't—so many of us now, Finn. I don't know how much you know, what you get to hear. But Iolo's gone, and Nien. Snap's around, but he's grounded, bad vision from a head injury.”

“Jess?”

Poe grins. “It'd take more firepower than the First Order has to kill Jess Pava.” But they both know that's not true. “Kare's still with us, too—she doesn't go up much these days, though, she's working with tactical a lot—and Bastian, I told you that, and a bunch of new recruits. Well, new _er._ But there's a lot of holes in those ranks, too.”

“I did hear about the losses,” Finn says. “I didn't know who it was, except I knew it wasn't you. That I would've heard about.”

“I should be there,” Poe says. “ _How_ long did you say it was until your team gets back?” It's unbelievable to him that Finn and his cronies have only one ship capable of lightspeed.

“Eight more local days,” Finn says, not for the first time. “Barring the unforeseen. Can I ask you something? When did you know something was going on?”

They're losing the light; the first two of the many moons the locals call “the Dancers” are inching above the tree line, red-gold and dirty white.

“It took a while,” Poe admits. “The analysts kept squabbling about it, whether anything was really even _happening,_ just a little collectivization here and a little strike there, could've been a coincidence. And then Nar Shadaa happened.”

Poe hasn't seen Finn smile since he got here, but the expression on Finn's face now is absolutely a smirk of pride.

 

 

_Six years earlier_

 

The thing about Nar Shadaa, the thing everyone in the galaxy knew about Nar Shadaa, was that there were no laws to speak of. People liked to use phrases like “rathtar eat rathtar” and “every sentient for themselves” about Nar Shadaa; they also liked to go to Nar Shadaa to buy what they couldn't buy anywhere else. They called it “anarchic,” but that wasn't really what they meant. Credits and the need for them created a kind of order that only looked chaotic. Allegiances were uneasy, temporary, and up for sale; the people of Nar Shadaa operated in grim, cutthroat isolation, and the mobsters raked off the profits.

Which is why the galaxy—even a galaxy at war—was rocked right down to the Core Worlds when over five thousand inhabitants of Nar Shadaa, sentients of eleven different species, including slaves and free people, seized the spaceport and held it against all comers. Within the tenday, they had all the major cities online and nearly a third of the slave collars deactivated; another tenday and they were implementing the deals they'd prepared with the gangs and a couple of neighboring worlds.

Finn wasn't even there when it happened, didn't even have a hand in it; he was working, helping to ship supplies and tools to a nascent settlement on an ice moon. He heard about it from Twelves and Echo, who'd been heading up operations on the ground, and Istra, who'd been liaising with the two closest moons to prepare them to support the transition. There were no official police or security forces in Nar Shadaa, no standing army and no seat of power, which was a big help in some ways; in others, it meant holding a hundred tiny lines instead of one big one.

But they'd been steadily getting food off transports and into people's hands, and they'd scaled up the clean-needle exchange that had been going on for years. They burned the slave market to the ground and danced on the ashes till they cooled. There was a team of scientists and engineers flown in from Potamoi to test and improve water safety. There were Councils of Thirteen, pulled from a range of ages and professions, to settle disputes and make recommendations for the righting of a wrong—not necessarily the method Finn would have chosen, but it was what people said they wanted.

All of this reached Finn scattershot, through couriers and tightly encrypted dispatches and sector media and crew rumors, only slowly building up to a picture of a world whose people, together, are determining what they need and figuring out how to work together to get it.

And that was when the real trouble started, because the thing everybody knew about Nar Shadaa was wrong. Multisystem conglomerates had been skimming the blue cream off Nar Shadaa for generations. When people are no longer desperate for money—for food, for shelter, for safety, for medicine--the number of things they'll do for it drops considerably; its motion grows sluggish, and it doesn't make it all the way up the long, patient capillaries that the conglomerates had built to draw it to themselves. The spaceport continued to hold. So the conglomerates sent drones and piloted ships, and they bombed Nar Shadaa from the air.

Not enough to destroy it—they didn't want that. Just enough to terrify, to break down infrastructure, to reduce what the people there had built and make them dependent and desperate again. In bars, on docks, in the hyperlanes, as Finn continued to travel and work and quietly pass on his message, he heard every possible reaction. “Let 'em bomb it into dust,” a Trandoshan trader spat. “Nothing worth keeping on Nar Shadaa.” A crew of lightsailors noisily mourned the brothels, and an elderly Duros in a communal kitchen spoke about her brother, who vanished there when he was young.

Finn was in that same kitchen, trying to keep grains from sticking to the bottom of a big cauldron, when the young Keshian came in, so full of news that their face outshone the stiff, blue-dyed crest of their hair and their glittery pants. The _Adamant_ had just entered Nar Shadaa space and knocked ten conglomerate ships out of orbit.

Finn forgot himself completely: he let out a startled whoop, dropped the spoon into the cauldron, and ran out into the street. Everything looked ordinary in the midday square: blue-tinged light from the sun and the gas giant together, crown trees just budding out in this hemisphere's spring, old people smoking on a bench and rubbing cold hands together, tea-sellers making their rounds with their steaming carts. Later he'd give a thought to the death toll in the conglomerates' ships—who even knew who those people were? Now no one would ever know, except the people who'd known them before. And he didn't fool himself that this was the end of anything; there would be more to come, more death and more confusion. But in that moment of one people coming to another's aid, the tears came to his eyes.

 

 

_Day 7, Day 8_

 

“The problem is, right now,” says Estetty the inventor, gesticulating in a way that makes Poe look restrained, “we still need some things to work the shitty way for other things to work the good way. Like my hoverchair, right? We got it donated to us, which is cool, but someone needed to make it, which means factories and metal smelting and injection molding and materials synthesis and resource extraction, not to mention transport and maintenance and fuel, and there's so many opportunities for exploitation to creep back in all over that map. And some of those things it's just _impossible_ to do the good way. So then, what, you don't do them? You find other ways for people like me to get around? Okay, fine, but what does that require, and how long does it take, and in the meantime am I just propped up in bed in a shitty one-room over a liquor store—which is where I was, by the way, when the Nar Shadaa team found me—drawing tinier and tinier diagrams because I'm running out of paper and pissing myself because the kid who was helping me twice a day had to stay home and watch his sister because his nana was—you get the idea, right? Yetta says strengthen the relationships, which, yeah, okay, but how do you strengthen the relationships if people only ever come to you and you can never go to them? So that's my part of it. And I have some ideas, Force, I have so _many_ ideas, none of which I can do up here in the fucking woods.” She sighs, seems to gather herself. “But it's good, it's not bad, I can help them keep it going up here, and I'm slated for the next team that's headed for the city, and the team that's there now scouted out a fabrication lab for me to start at. I can't _wait._ ”

They love to talk to him here, Poe has found, in any pause between scouting missions and errands and chores, or during any task that's compatible with talking. They've told him about the security forces down in the city—well-trained, but rigid and thus fragile, according to them—and what they did to a supposed recruit who turned out to be a serial rapist. While he sits tinkering with the circuitry of the rototiller, they tell him stories of the worlds they left to come here, how they hope to bring the changes home one day. They're happy to have a new person, maybe, an outsider, someone who doesn't know the score already but who they're not carefully trying to convince.

Not that they talk to him about anything they've decided—Finn's decided?--they've decided he shouldn't know. He doesn't know how many people are down in the city, or what they're doing; he doesn't even know the name of the world they're on. They won't say anything about the Messengers' other missions, or even (when he probes gently) whether they were involved in any one specific shift of power on any given world. He gets it, he really does—he wouldn't trust him either—but in light of his instructions to try to broker some kind of arrangement with the Messengers and their people, an arrangement that they've apparently already calculated for without the Resistance knowing, it's a little frustrating.

Not as frustrating as being stuck here, though, unable to get back or even get much news. Not as frustrating as seeing Finn glancingly, in passing, in between briefings and consultations and work shifts. Seeing him deliberate with Bol and Fevrier over the pace of the next phase, elbows on his knees, brow furrowed; seeing him consult with Estetty over the placement of the suntraps, or settle a wrangle between two of the kids over a bug that one of them tied to a stick; seeing him roll his eyes at a dispute between Yrui and Darapar before stepping in to make a suggestion; seeing him lift his bowl of homebrew when they're naming the dead around the fire one night, saying, “Iolo and Nien,” the warmth of the firelight brushing his face. It's clear that his people love him, and because of him, each other; it's clear why. Poe loves him too, names it, recognizes that it has no place here.

There's a scare that night, the scouts reporting an armed band on the eastern slope. Poe pitches in to help the entire camp pick up everything that's not staked down and carry it deeper into the forest, where half of them shin up the trees with a system of pulleys he'd never have seen on his own and half of them shelter in big mounds of clay and leaves that dip far underground, some of them almost big enough to stand upright in. “They used to be ants' nests,” Yrui explains, almost unvoiced, in the dark.

“Any ants in 'em now?”

He can feel the old Abednedo woman's shrug; they're packed in tight, and a ten-year-old is drooling against his other shoulder. “Guess we'll find out.”

After a few hours, the scouts report that it's safe to return. Just a hunting party, maybe, but they'll need to be extra alert the next few days. The Dancers' light filters down through the leaves to lead them back to camp. Poe checks his clothes carefully for ants before lying down to sleep.

The next day, he and Finn work together to help people put the roofs back on their shelters and put everything back where it goes. Serengeva says it's good for him to use his arm and shoulder but he should still be careful with his leg, so he holds the struts in place while Finn climbs around stretching fabric. They pause for a moment in the hot part of the day and pass a bowl of water back and forth; in the shade, out of sight, Finn lets his shoulders slump. “You look tired,” Poe says. “Couldn't sleep?”

“No, woke up early. Comm from the Messenger on Haupera. They're not doing so good there. The principle continent got rid of their oligarchs about five standard years ago, no direct involvement with us, they just kind of got the idea, and it's been a rough five years. Someone saw that and thought it would be a good spot to peddle a tricky new kind of synthetic whatchamacallit, opiate, but that's not the only problem—they have guilds there, professional guilds, and a couple of them are try to set up to do what the oligarchs did and the rest of them are getting scared and trying to do the same thing instead of banding together and getting the first two to back down.”

He sighs. “Sorry. C'mon, let's do the rest of this. Pass me those ties.” Poe does. “People always say, 'Oh, we're moving forward,' or 'Oh, we're gonna get things back to the way they were.' But it's not back or forward, it's _throughout._ You have to keep doing it all the time, it's not just something that happens once.”

“Like love,” Poe says without thinking.

Finn freezes. Someone watching him less closely than Poe does might miss it. Then he relaxes, from his face on down, and laughs a little. “Yeah, like love. You didn't used to be so poetic.”

“You didn't used to—no, you know what, never mind. That's not even true. You were always a leader, the minute you had the chance.”

“Thanks,” Finn says quietly, which surprises Poe—he hadn't meant it as a compliment so much, just a description. They finish tying down that roof and move on to the next.

“Speaking of that,” Poe says. “You probably figured that the General sent me to see if you wanted to work together, if I could find you. Not that we knew it was you. I'm empowered to make you an offer, but looking around here, I'm not sure what else you need.” He gestures broadly with his free hand, taking in the terraced fields, the hum of voices rising in recitation from the low school building, the lunch crew, Meilo joking with Ousmane as she shaves his head for him, the long slopes and folds of the wooded hills.

“Are you kidding,” Finn says, “we need so much, we need money, people, ships, weapons, everything. The problem is I don't think you exactly have a surplus of those. Would you trust us with your plans? Strategy?”

“I thought you said you knew about our plans.”

“No, I said we keep track of what you do. If we knew what you were _going_ to do, we could work it into what we're doing, tell you what we're trying for, make it complementary. Plan together. I was thinking about asking you, if you didn't ask me.”

They grin at each other, and for a second it's like the years lift, the way they speak and think in answer to one another waking after a long sleep.

“Could you be seen, though? Openly negotiating with us?”

“ _I_ couldn't, but probably some of us could. The thing is, here in the Outer Rim, power shifts around all the time and nobody in the Core cares, it's just backwater politics, and so far that's protected us. But we want to move inward, obviously, or there's no point, and sooner or later we're going to catch somebody's attention, if what we're doing works. And if planetary governments got the idea that they could make some kind of allegiance with the First Order in exchange for keeping things the way they are--” Finn shakes his head. “I can't see how we could ask people to bring that down on themselves without some kind of counter-reassurance that we can't provide right now.”

“You think you could use us as your firepower? Maybe," Poe says doubtfully, trying to think it through. “You're talking about people or, like, planetary governments? Like if whole planets, _except_ the government, aligned with the Resistance as part of—I don't think we've seen that. That's a headache and a half.”

“Sure, I know. But after Nar Shadaa, the galaxy's talking about us a little bit. We could try using that. There's probably a way to use it. I'll have to listen to some people. I'll start asking around, if you're serious about trusting us.”

“I trust you,” Poe says, meaning it. “My bosses, I don't know. Let's keep it hypothetical for now, map out how it would work, what channels we'd use, what kinds of things you'd want to know and be willing to tell us.” His elation sinks at the prospect of all that haggling—most of it probably won't be his job, but still—and the pain in his arm reasserts itself. “I think I need a rest,” he says, and sits back in the shade.

“Stay here,” Finn says. “I'll bring you something to eat.” Poe watches him walk over to the firepits, nodding to this person, touching that person's arm, squatting down to chat with the people who are cooking. The ease and gravity of his walk and his presence, not to mention the shape of his ass even in those terrible baggy pants. The way it felt to smile together again, to understand each other. Poe massages his left shoulder with his right hand and gets his face ready for when Finn starts walking back towards him.

 

 

_Five years earlier_

 

They could feel the change. Istra called it “spring,” a strange idea in the void between the stars, and still foreign to Finn's space-raised senses even though he'd now lived through a dozen different springs on a dozen different worlds.

It was in one of those springs, a rainy season, that he met Ayere. He and Darapar and Juz were doing reconnaissance on Renatasia, very slowly and cautiously. For an Outer Rim world, they were surprisingly wealthy; their planetary government was heavily bureaucratized in a way that the First Order would have envied, their culture—not coincidentally—favored isolation and technological mediation, and here on the northern continent they had a caste system that they pretended they didn't have. He went around the capital city, asked questions, listened and learned, but he had it in mind to give them another month or so and then relegate this particular world to the back burner.

As part of his cover, and also to earn a living while he was here, Finn was working security at a big, splashy festival—music, lightshow, pheremones, the works. Because of the pheremones, he and all the other guards were wearing filter masks, and their shape and color kept shaking him. At least he could see people's eyes. One pair in particular, long-lidded and calm in a face half a head below his, reassured him even as the mask unsettled him. Steady, calm—and something more, something that had Finn wondering what the rest of that face looked like.

Later, on the way out of the stadium, he got to see: high round cheekbones, finely drawn mustache, a generous mouth quirked up at one corner. “Feeling better?” the stranger asked. “Where you headed?”

“The hostel on Street 6.”

“My place is closer.”

Ordinarily Finn would have laughed ruefully, said, “Thanks anyway,” walked off into the night. He hadn't been with anyone in a long time—a few quick fucks with crewmates, but no one at all he was working with in his other capacity. Too much could go wrong. As for accepting this invitation, it would be almost suicidally stupid. The stranger could be a predator in one or more of a thousand ways. He could be in the planetary secret police. He could even be working for the First Order, whose heavy head had swiveled toward them at last after the noise made by Nar Shadaa and the rash of copycat revolutions.

But the shakiness had left Finn feeling empty and new, and it was spring, and the rain had let up for a second and the city smelled like pollen and clean stone. He said, “Kiss me here first, and we'll see.”

Kissing in public was illegal in the city. The stranger stepped neatly over the wet reflection of a streetlamp and settled his hands at Finn's waist. He kissed Finn seriously, no tricks, just wet heat and total concentration, and Finn bent to him, sunk into his mouth.

When he stepped back they were both breathing hard. “You're right,” the stranger said. “Let's wait. You working tomorrow?”

“Not till Hour 7,” Finn said, his body buzzing like the streetlamp.

“You said Street 6? There's a fountain at the end of it, red stone, ugly, and an eating-place with a green awning. Meet me there at Hour 4 and we'll talk, and then we can go to work together.” He turned on his heel and walked off in a direction at a right angle to Finn's route, and Finn had to physically hold back from following him.

Ayere said later, much later, to a third person asking about how they met, that he came for the good dick and stayed for the politics. Since the difference between Ayere serious and Ayere joking was a micrometer adjustment of his left eyebrow, Finn was never sure if this was true. But by that point, it was the only thing about Ayere he was unsure of.

Finn's own natural tendency was to trust quickly and deeply, but years of this work had made him better at judging and questioning people's sincerity, their commitment, the role of their ego, the scale of their dreams. Ayere asked pertinent questions without demanding information that would put them at risk. He made almost no promises—none at all, for many months. He came to meet with the three of them and a couple others they'd gathered, including a couple more of the part-time security guards, but while they talked big he mostly listened, weighing in very occasionally on things he felt confident about. Later, he took on tasks that committed him absolutely—not stupid risks, he was a cautious man, but a way to let them know that he was with them, and that this world, his world, was worth the trouble.

They had two years of preparation there, meticulous and grueling, setting up a slow controlled burn throughout a weary and dead-eyed population. Finn spent a couple of weeks in jail again, the first time since the first time, and was never totally sure why they let him go, red-eyed and sleepless from the bright lights; after that, their step-picking progress became even slower and more agonizing.

But at the end of each long day, he could go back to Ayere's two-rooms-and-a-fresher over a speeder garage, step into the strong circle of his arms, sink down and suck Ayere's cock—as short and thick and mouthwatering as the rest of him—till he drew out the deep quiet groans that were as gratifying as a scream would be from someone else. They could lie together in the reek of sex and the shifting light from the street traffic, not talking—there was so much _talking_ in the rest of Finn's day—with Ayere's lips pressed to Finn's temple, his hand on Finn's belly, his heat and weight and presence like an anchor.

All that second year, the local cells had been planning together in key places, some leaving their employment to work into and build alternative systems of sustenance, some agreeing to stay as skeleton staff so there wouldn't be a panic before they were ready. Now there was a bill coming up to make it illegal not to work for money, which probably meant they needed to move soon. More often now, Ayere and Finn lay down fully dressed in case they had to run and just held on, breath and warmth and heartbeat, interruptable flesh. “What do you want?” Finn asked him. “What do you see?”

“My home,” Ayere said after a long pause. “For all of it to _be_ home, for everyone who lives here.” Finn waited, but Ayere didn't say anything else, just held him close.

The next morning, the police broke down the door. They were already running, they'd knocked the sand bucket off the fire escape onto the officer stationed below and were through the ring and gone, panting through the streets, running for the rendezvous at the underground droid-fighting gym. Darapar was there, bandaging Fallon's hand. Juz was caught. All over the continent, Finn hoped, people were laying low, ducking out, destroying evidence. But he couldn't know.

Fallon got the holoreceiver working in time to catch the end of a broadcast, a Cabinet spokesperson reading a speech—obviously prepared, but with equally obvious relish—about agitators and malcontents, a threat to stability, the prompt action of the planetary police. A brief image of two people in uniform wrestling Juz into a hovercraft, another image of one of the weapons caches— _shit._ Finn could tell his grip on Ayere's hand was too tight, but Ayere didn't flinch or pull away.

“Go carefully,” Ayere said, calm as always, when they were about to split up and head to separate safe houses.

“I'll see you soon,” Finn said, shouldering his pack.

Ayere shook his head, pulled Finn down for a kiss.

The news reached Finn almost a season later, when he and Darapar had reached the camp in the hills that Yetta and the others had been setting up for the past three years, but it was old news by then: the planetary police had cornered Ayere at the pneumatic train station not long after they parted, and beaten him to death there. The person who brought the news to camp said that they'd been across the platform, waiting for their train, and that seeing it had decided them to come find the Messengers instead.

 

 

_Day 9, Day 10_

 

“ _This_ is his world,” Poe say, legitimately surprised. “You stayed?”

“Sure. What was I gonna do, leave? After that?”

“Well. Yeah.”

It registers, clearly, but Finn takes it without flinching. “I'm sorry about that,” he says. “I should've stayed with the Resistance, I think sometimes, but I didn't.”

They're almost done turning over the compost trenches, a smelly but satisfying job that like almost every task in camp makes Poe's shoulder ache. Everyone's agreed to stick close to camp and keep comm silence with the people in the city for the next few days, in case the supposed hunting party was actually hunting for them. “I don't know,” Poe says. “Are you sorry to be who you are right now? Because that person, I haven't known him long, but he seems pretty good.”

Finn doesn't respond to this directly, just reapplies himself to digging, shoulders and arms flexing against his shirt so that Poe has to take a big breath in through his nose to distract himself. They work the rest of the way down the trenches and then Finn says, “Let's go wash off.”

The rain barrels are low and so is the river—it's the dry season, the end of this world's summer--but they sluice off in the little pool that forms just below the camp, and scrub their clothes against the rocks. Poe is glad that he has to concentrate to keep his balance on the shifting rocks of the streambed; otherwise he'd have to think too hard about not ogling Finn and not looking away from Finn so pointedly that it would be as bad as ogling. He does look up once while Finn's wetting his face, head back, spine arched, thighs tense; feels the blood leave his head straight for his dick. He turns to the side and splashes himself with stream water, not as cold as it could be, but helpful.

He wants to go back to the Resistance, _now, tonight,_ and he never wants to go back. He wants to laze around on the rocks with Finn while their clothes dry—if touching's off the table, and it seems like it probably is because if Finn was going to start anything now would be the time and he isn't, maybe talking or maybe just feeling the sun.

There isn't time; it isn't safe. They put their clothes on wet and start back up the slope to camp. “I was already glad to be doing this,” Finn says, picking up where they left off, the way they used to. “But after Ayere died it got this extra … feeling to it, like I was doing it for him. Like I had to stay here on his world, give it at least as much as he did. I wish I'd asked him more about what it meant to him—home. What he thought it could be, what he thought it was, you know, at the heart of it, the _reason_ of it. Can something be your home if it doesn't exist yet?”

“Maybe kinda,” Poe says, thinking it out as he goes. “When I go up, sometimes I'll think about you having the life you wanted. Quiet, doing stuff because you want to, not 'cause anyone's making you. How maybe, when I'm shooting at people, I'm helping you do that. Little did I know.” He meant that to come out lightly, he really did, but Finn glances back at him, downslope, and it's like clear water running toward him, washing over him.

Back at camp, Finn veers off—more planning, more adjusting, more negotiating, more consensus to build. The Resistance isn't anybody's idea of a strict military structure, but Poe's overheard a few of these consensus meetings and they make him grind his teeth with their quibbling and inefficiency. He sits down to a pile of mending, redoes seams and sews patches till the light fades.

The scouts come panting up the slope while the rest of camp is eating dinner, charging into the firelit circle: a group of 20, armored and armed, headed this way. The camp moves into evacuation mode again, a grim bustle. A few people pour liquid from canisters around the base of the shelters. “What was that?” Poe asks Fevrier, closest to him as they enter the forest. Estetty's zooming ahead in her hoverchair with a sack of grain and five-year-old Tiel on her lap, and Meilo has Yrui on her back.

“Accelerant.” Fevrier's voice is barely a whisper. “If they fire the buildings, the blaze might catch them too. It's worth a try.”

They repeat the motions of a few nights back, taking refuge in the canopy or underground, dim moonlight casting enough light to move by. Suddenly Finn's at Poe's elbow, an urgent shadow, pushing a blaster into his hand: “You still good at shooting from cover?”

“Good enough, but I still can't move fast.”

“'S okay. Pick a spot.”

“Shoot to disable or to kill?”

“Don't shoot at all unless they're getting close to one of the shelters. If we kill one of them we have to kill them all, we can't leave any to report back. You have to aim for extremities, that body armor's pretty heavy, and then go close up to kill them.”

So Poe settles down in some underbrush with a good clear 200-degree view, seeks a position that won't put much strain on his bad leg, gives up, and waits. The forest sounds trickle back in around him, insect trills and croaks, a periodic snuffle and rustle in the leaf litter, then stop abruptly when human footsteps enter the clearing, moving heavily, like they expected pavement.

There are five of them, so the others must be fanning out elsewhere. Judging from their silhouettes, they came out with an impressive amount of firepower, but they clearly don't know what they're looking for. Poe takes aim only once, when the dim moonlight catches a bulky, armored figure too close to one of the anthill shelters, but it turns out they're just taking a piss. They move off, and the night sounds filter in again.

Poe moves when he hears someone else moving, heads for the closest anthill. This one's not as packed as last time: he strikes a light so as not to step on people, shielding it from the entrance with his hand just in case. A few people are already asleep, leaning on or holding each other or curled into a seashell shape on the ground, and he can't say he blames them; the wet of others' eyes, open and anxious, catches his flame and he smiles to reassure them. Sits down by Meilo, who's trembling, and puts an arm around her like he's known her for years.

The trembling doesn't stop, but she presses back, giving comfort as much as receiving it, because you share what you have, even if you don't have much. His light goes out and he thinks, _I've known these people for nine days._ The future of the galaxy, the answer to what happens after the end: he wants them to live and their message to spread. But he's so tired. His body aches from moving fast through the woods and holding still in the underbrush, and his mind flashes in and out of the kind of sleep you only know when you startle up from it.

He wakes more fully when Finn and Ousmane come in, Ousmane settling on Meilo's other side, pulling her into a one-armed hug. Finn crouches on Poe's free side. “No activity,” he says, close to Poe's ear. “They might double back. Staying put till daybreak at least.”

“Got it. You okay?”

“Yeah, fine. At least we know the tip didn't come voluntarily from one of us. They didn't know about the hiding places. They might've beaten the camp location out of someone, though, we'll try to find out tomorrow.”

“Shh,” Poe says, meaning _Be tranquil,_ meaning _Rest._ Not his usual mode, he knows, but someone has to. Finn nods, Poe feels the motion close to his own head. And gravity changes, the world tilts in two directions at once, spilling them toward each other, so that Finn's mouth is warm on his and his arms are around Finn and they're pressed as close as they can be, falling toward each other's centers.

There's a low giggle from someone, maybe Ousmane, and a hasty shushing, but Poe realizes these things in a gauzy, delayed way. He's all taken up with Finn, with the smell of sweat and forest floor and hair oil, with every inch and angle of soft skin his mouth can reach, with the crazy solidity of Finn in his arms. He holds Finn's head still and kisses his forehead, his eyelids, his mouth again, his cheeks, his mouth again, and again, and again. He does all this slowly, but with as much fervor as if he were doing it fast.

If they were fresh and rested they'd be tearing at each other, biting and cursing, eager and desperate. They're both too tired for that, and the shelter's still too full of other people, and it's not safe to step out into the night. But the urgency is there, so that even the softest touch is trembling and intense.

Poe puts both hands under Finn's shirt and strokes his sides and back, Finn's skin feverishly warm. His hands shake with the twenty caresses he wants to give instead of the one he can manage. He bites back the noises he so wants to make when Finn kisses his throat, hauls at the neck of Poe's shirt to kiss his collarbone. Time is something that happens to other people; Poe doesn't know how long they've been kissing when they lie down finally, on their sides first and then with Finn's full weight on him, pressing him into the dirt floor.

They've never known each other this way, never tasted each other before this, never strained up into the other's touch, and yet Poe almost can't believe that, not just how good it feels but how right. He wants to live in this, wants this to be his life forever. Right now he doesn't care if he comes or not, doesn't care if he ever gets to rise out of the ground, he just wants to be with Finn, hold him, hear him sighing, kiss him till their lips are cracked and jaws are sore.

He wakes up, so he must have fallen asleep. Finn's still half on top of him and a little faint daylight filters in through the entryway. His shoulder's damp where Finn's been drooling on it. He shifts his other arm, which hurts like a sonofabitch; he didn't mean to disturb Finn, but Finn stirs, kisses into Poe's neck before he's even fully awake. “Hey,” Poe says—quietly, because everyone around them is still asleep.

“Mm. Hey.” Finn rolls sideways, looks Poe in the face—he always came awake fast, Poe remembers from when they shared a room. “Come check outside with me.”

All of Poe's joints protest as he gets to his feet, and his ass is numb where it pressed against the dirt floor. He's limping when he gets upright in the sunlight, and he knows Finn can see it. They hear only wind in the leaves, no human motion, but the bitterness of smoke and ash etches into the forest air, and they follow it back toward camp.

Finn stops while the trees are still thick, so Poe stops too, and Finn pulls him close, kisses him deep and open-mouthed, while the forest wheels around them.

“Yeah?” Poe says when the kiss breaks.

“Yeah. I wanted you to know it wasn't a mistake.”

“No,” Poe says, “I mean, yeah,” and leans back in.

They walk on finally, and when the trees thin out and the clearing opens in front of him Poe sucks in breath through his teeth. The buildings are gone—a few charred uprights, one whole wall free-standing, black circles in the dirt that for a moment look like craters. The body of a person in scorched and blistered armor lies half-in, half out of one of these. Finn walks steadily up, checks for a pulse, stands again. His face looks the way it did when Poe woke up in the hospital building, stern and still and folded in.

The comm tower is smashed, its crystals dangling. They check the fields—sprayed with some kind of synthetic that smells like carpet cleaner, and maybe is—and here Finn's lower jaw juts out, his hands make fists. Poe's weirdly relieved to see it. He doesn't ask questions or touch. He wants to ask what's next, how he can help, but he's going by how he himself gets when he makes it home after a bad run, and in those moments every approach feels like an unreasonable demand. He matches Finn's steps as they walk back through the remains of the camp, some of the ashes still hot, metal pinging where someone left behind a cooking pot or a farm tool.

They're about halfway back to the shelters when Finn says, “We need to figure out what to do about the city teams, and I'll have Yetta and someone else take the kids down to the village. They all have friends there now, from school, and maybe we can use the attack to work up some sympathy. It might be time to get Darapar offplanet with you, she won't want to go, but this is the second time they've come after her and I know they have her image up in government buildings.”

“What about you?” The minute Poe lets himself think it, even for a second, he slaps it down. But for that one moment, he thought about Finn coming back with him.

“Oh, they have mine up too,” Finn says, maybe willfully misunderstanding, though that doesn't seem like his style. Poe gives up and asks, “What can I do to help?”

 

 

_Two years earlier_

 

The camp was their first shot at setting something up from scratch, but of course nothing's ever really from scratch, you bring your ideas and habits about what could be and should be along with you.

He and Yetta had their first argument almost immediately: she'd set up a kind of voting system for making decisions about how to continue operations in Yeon, the small city they'd identified as a good place to bring their messages. But if they wanted to start as they meant to go on, they should obviously have a consensus structure, where they didn't act unless they were ready to act together. He got his way, and then felt like maybe he was imposing it on everybody else, like maybe he still hadn't shaken off the First Order entirely.

It went on like that. Darapar wanted to divide everyone's tasks, and Finn wanted a rota, and Yetta reminded them a little sarcastically that they were supposed to ask everyone in camp what they should do—and then of course it took three weeks to figure it out, but in the meantime people just took on some of the tasks out of necessity. The conversations went on for a long time, into the night, with the fire sparking and smoking and everyone's eyes stinging. None of the arguments was ever just about the thing that started it, it was about how they wanted to live, how they would live if they could—well, now they had the opportunity, sort of, if it weren't for the periodic drills for what to do if planetary security or hostile neighbors caught up with them, if it weren't for the knowledge that everything they were making, however good they tried to make it, was fragile and easily swept away.

And he was wrapped in grief, soaked in it, draped in it, the fact of Ayere's murder accompanying him wherever he went, sitting beside him at every meeting, walking with him on every patrol, lying down beside him at night. It went with him into Yeon, where he waved fake papers at the gate guards and took his perfectly legitimate back pain to the new free clinic founded by some of Yetta's recruits. It hovered by his side when the first message that came through the new comms array was that Twelves was dead, too, on some mining moon, a bar fight, the comm said, somehow managing to convey bitter skepticism in the few ciphered syllables.

But they adjusted, and they fought, and they made do. Four recruits left the camp in anger, and the rest of them took turns sitting up many nights in a row, blasters charged and bowcasters across their laps, backs propped against the walls of the shelters they'd just built to accommodate new people. But no one came, for three nights, for six nights, at all, and Finn thought maybe that was as good a sign as anything of what they were building: it was possible for people to be angry at them without wanting to hurt them.

Estetty joined them that year, at speed, buzzing and bustling around the camp in her hoverchair, adjusting and improving, wooing the battle-hardened and suspicious Yetta and the new recruit Meilo with ferocious intensity. Finn liked her restlessness and verve, her enthusiasm for workarounds, the way she talked about freedom like _of course_ it was something everyone would want. It reminded him of Poe, who cropped up in the news from their Resistance observers from time to time—not specifically, just as a side note: _that flying ace of theirs pulled it out again._ Battles in atmo and in the void, in the Core and on the edge of Wild Space: Finn and the rest of the Messengers noted them strategically, planned their own campaigns accordingly, and if any of them thought of his brief Resistance past they kept it to themselves. Only once, back in the old city, had he and Juz looked up at a grainy holoclip playing in a bar: Juz had said, “Hey, isn't that the guy you rescued?” And there was Poe's face, static and badly lit—a WANTED holo, looked like.

“We rescued each other,” Finn had said, and Juz had nodded, and then their contact showed up, and that was that. But he still was always glad to hear that Poe was still flying.

The news also came through that a bunch of deserting stormtroopers and a bunch of Hosnian refugees and a bunch of droids of various sorts had taken three star destroyers and a bunch of asteroid fragments and _lashed them together,_ somehow. They'd created a kind of giant floating conglomerate, rounding up and mining asteroids and taking in new ones as necessary, and trading the ore for the food they couldn't grow hydroponically—Finn could barely take it in and frankly thought it sounded kind of nuts, but it also delighted him, in the same way that Estetty did. Somebody, at least, was feeling the spring inside.

Sometimes he felt it too, a little leap of flame in his chest. When the first crops came up in the fields they'd worked so hard to terrace (and before the stem borers took out a good third of them), in the year's actual spring. When some funds came through from the crazy asteroid miners to help keep the free clinic going and start a free kitchen, down in Yeon. When Meilo and Ousmane got together and got pregnant, and Estetty went wild making baby toys out of machine parts, and Serengeva came up from the city to help Meilo give birth and just stayed.

Finn took his turn holding Shireen on her naming day and told her that her life would be free, that her only bonds would be chosen, that she was surrounded by people who wanted the whole galaxy to be open to her and were working to bring that galaxy into being—he might have been a little drunk, then. Shireen yawned and farted and fell asleep in the middle of his speech.

Everyone got a little drunk, that night. The proud father stumbled off into the woods with Luun. Estetty reclined, out of her chair and trusting, in Meilo's tired arms, while Yetta held Shireen and whispered to her in a language whose speakers were mostly dead. The older kids, who'd stayed up for the naming, finally tapped out, heads pillowed on their elbows or on an adult's knee.

Finn left the fire and lay down in his place in the longhouse, where two people he couldn't see were dreamily kissing on their sleeping mat and another person he couldn't see was asleep and snoring. He never slept alone, and he always slept alone. In the morning there would be reports and tasks and planning, meetings and discussions, his turn to make food for everybody—he's bad at it so Darapar always pairs him with someone who's good at it—and hopefully no bloody surprises.

He asked himself, as he did every night, no matter how tired he was: _If this is it, if this is all there is, am I willing to work for it?_ So far the answer was still _yes,_ but that night it was a weary _yes_ , and resigned.

 

 

_Day 10, continued_

 

There's no more time for kissing that day. They make their way back to the shelters, where everyone's behaving in a way new in Poe's experience: they're obviously deadly worried, and equally obviously disciplined, but there's no brittleness to them. They're tending each other just as they do in camp. When Poe comes into the shelter, Meilo is nursing Shireen to keep her calm, Ousmane and Bol are talking politics, two other people Poe doesn't know as well are talking speeder engines, and Darapar's clipping Estetty's toenails for her while she sketches designs for something in the air. When she sees Poe, she stops gesturing mid-cable—it's a hydraulic lift, he gathers—and snaps, “All clear?”

“All clear,” Poe says, “up to a point. But the camp's burnt. Finn'll be here in a second, he's getting everyone down from the trees. Yetta already sent the kids out to pee.”

“I gotta get out of here, it smells like armpits and ant eggs,” Estetty says. “Someone help me into my chair.” Poe lifts her easily, her lower body undergrown and contracted, and she zips out of the opening that they specially enlarged for her when they hollowed out this particular anthill—so she'd told him during the alarm that turned out to be nothing. Everyone else is gathering themselves up, rubbing stiff knees and doing up clothes.

They convene aboveground, and Finn lays the situation out for them, sketches out his plan, invites comment. Poe just listens. He's never heard them decide something both big and close before—all the strategy for missions running currently was developed before he came on the scene—and he only realizes how different he expected it to be from their usual negotiations about small decisions and chores when he hears how different it's not. They weigh options, argue with real heat, make fun of each other, even laugh. It makes the Resistance's strategy briefings seem cold and militaristic, and it takes what feels to Poe like an excruciating time, and he has to bite back the urge to yell that the people who burned the camp could be coming back _now._

And yet looking around the circle, he understands that if that happened, everyone would fight. They're armed, and their posture is alert; as they listen to each other, they're also listening outward, into the forest, waiting, better at waiting than he's ever been.

They've come to a resolution, he realizes, decided who's going to seek out a site for another camp and who's going to head into Yeon and who's going to ask the villagers if they can stay for a bit—this is mostly Yetta and Meilo and the kids—and who's going to make for the big city, because if they were under attack here it probably means a renewed crackdown's coming there. They stand and begin dividing their supplies accordingly, food and weapons and the roof frameworks and canvases, which double as tents. Finn hands one to Poe and says, “Can you carry this? We're gonna have to wait up at the campsite for your ride.”

“I could just go to the port,” Poe offers. “I can work my way back to Resistance space no problem, I was gonna have to take a roundabout route anyway from wherever your guys drop me.”

“They'll be coming back here anyway, and you'll get back quicker,” Finn says. “Probably. Besides.” He doesn't say besides what, but he pauses in the middle of strapping his pack on and looks very directly and unmistakably at Poe, who only realizes he's grinning when his face starts to hurt. “You're gonna wait with me.”

“The people going into the cities will be safer if they're not n a big group with me,” Finn says. “I'll make for Yeon later, after the pickup, join them there. It makes strategic sense.”

Poe knows that this is true, that Finn wouldn't take an unnecessary risk or let a plan be less than optimal just to get something he personally wanted. He also feels like he's just been handed a medal of honor, because Finn is making a plan _around him._ Finn is doing, with Poe in mind, the thing he does best.

He can't stop smiling, but he can at least make himself useful. He helps Yrui tighten the straps on her pack, tells Darapar—who's insisting on returning to the capital city she retreated from two years ago—to knock 'em dead. “Some of them, I hope,” she says. All around him, people are solemnizing their goodbyes. “Let me kiss my girls,” Estetty says, “let me kiss all my girls,” and she scoots her hoverchair over to gather in Meilo, along with Shireen in the sling on her back, and then drags them over to where Yetta's superintending the older kids. She holds them all in her long, strong, skinny arms. Meilo even does a half-twirl so that Shireen can get kisses too. None of them say anything about seeing each other soon.

Hugs and handshakes, backslaps and nose rubs, and then they're off by their various paths. Finn and Poe are going with the village contingent to trade work for supplies for the next few days, and to help apprise them of the situation. The procession downslope is on the subdued side, but Poe teaches the kids a few of the marching chants and handclap games he and his cousins learned when they were about this size. They teach him a few too: “Heart and tree and field and flame, keep us walking in your name. Blaster, cookfire, song and dance, make the mighty shit their pants.” They collapse in giggles, so that he and Yetta have to haul them up by the armpits and get them, in fact, to keep walking.

They run into two girls gathering honey from a rotten tree, and Finn asks one of them to run ahead and let the headwomen know that a few the strange people from up the mountain are coming by. “We'll help you get the honey out,” he says to the other one.

“Yes please,” she says, “the poya will be back soon,” so everyone with a free hand helps her dig into the soft, damp wood and collect the honey, which smells like thigh-crease and sugar and heat. When they've gotten as much as they can reach and the stickiness quotient of the party is up by about 250%, they move on their way. Poe asks Yrui, “I don't want to know what a poya is, do I?”

“Are,” she says. “They're the insects that make the honey. You wouldn't like them.”

“How's your pack?”

“Heavy enough,” she says shortly. “We're almost there.”

The girl who ran ahead is waiting to take them to the headwomen's house. Because of the school, Yetta has had the most dealings with the village, so she does most of the talking, catching them up on what happened and reviewing what they're planning next. “We don't want to bring trouble on you,” she says.

The older of the two headwomen sits for a while, smoking something that smells like a damp fire. “Looks like it's time for us to get serious,” she says finally. “We've been talking about you all, down here. It's not you who's bringing the trouble.”

“We need to confer,” says the younger, with a sharp glance at her counterpart. “Why don't you all have a steam, and we'll talk again over some food.”

Poe doesn't know what she means by _have a steam,_ but everyone else seems to, so he troops along obediently and finds himself surrounded by revolutionaries stripping themselves down with gusto outside a small house. Inside, the air is hot and damp and fragrant, like all the rainforests of his home planet concentrated into a tiny space with benches around the edge. Now that Finn's expressed at least _some_ interest, Poe feels entitled to a little ogling, and there's plenty to see even through the wisps of steam: not just the acreage of shoulders and the high round ass and the broad thighs with their torque of muscle, but the way he moves, judged perfectly for the close quarters as he steps precisely around the pit where the hot stones are, folds himself onto one of the benches, catches Poe looking, smiles.

If it weren't so literally hot, Poe would be hard as one of those stones right now, but the moist heat has him limp and dizzy. It feels good to his injuries, though, soaking down deep—he hadn't realized how much pain he'd been in from walking and carrying all day until it started to ease.

Later they eat with the two headwomen and about ten other people, from a child up to a wizened old person—some kind of advisory council, Poe gathers. They sit cross-legged in threes and fours, eating out of big bowls in the center, and don't talk directly about revolution, if that's what this is turning out to be: they ask about Poe's parents and his homeworld, and he gives them the kinds of answers he'd give on an undercover run, safe for them to have. Then they look at him expectantly, and he realizes that if he treats this as a fact-finding mission, he can ask the kinds of things he really wants to know.

“Auntie,” he says, using the form of address he's heard other villagers use, “what do you do if there's poison in a field?”

The older woman he's talking to smiles widely, as if she's proud of him, showing a missing eyetooth. “Ah, you want to talk to Doctor Auntie. I'll get her. Tobeshe! Tobeshe! This boy has a question for you.” A stouter, slightly younger woman rises from her circle and turns to him expectantly, and he repeats his question.

“Sour poison or bitter poison?”

Poe thinks of the carpet-cleaner smell. “Bitter, I think, Doctor Auntie.”

“For sour you need shit, toko shit is best but human will work, and wood ashes, then you plant okori. For bitter poison you need lots and lots of uburu leaves, the broken-down ones are best, the ones that are almost dirt, and then you plant sipa vines. I'll come in two days and taste your field for you. You know where the uburu groves are? You let me know when you have the leaves dug in, I have sipa cuttings all ready to go.”

“That helped a lot,” Finn says later, when they've left the village settling down for sleep and are making their way up the mountain again by the light of the Dancers. By the end of the evening, Doctor Auntie had been one of the strongest advocates for the villagers taking a more active role. “How'd you think to ask her that?”

“I thought she'd like it,” Poe says, feeling his leg starting to knot up again already around the injury. “Or, I didn't know it would be her, but I thought there'd be someone who'd know and who'd like to be asked. And I thought you'd want to know. Win-win.”

“You're good at that.”

“Winning?”

“No, you're only so-so at winning. Talking to people, listening to people, I don't know.”

“Says the man who got people to turn six _different_ planets upside down. You must be doing something right.” The hill steepens, and Poe's hip is hurting too much to ignore. He says, “Finn, I gotta rest, I'm sorry.”

Finn stops instantly. “No problem. Matter of fact, let's get off the trail and pitch the tent.”

They work together easily to get the tent up, stretching and holding steady, trading places. “We could've slept down in the village with everyone,” Poe says, testing.

“Yeah,” Finn says, fastening the last eyelet to the last strut, “we could've.” Three steps get him to Poe's side. Poe pivots and meets his mouth halfway, a kiss with a stutter in it, then Finn's mouth locking on and chasing his, pulling back only to say, “Let's get in the tent, I don't wanna stop.”

“I don't even know what you like,” Finn says once they're kneeling on the groundsheet in the tent's dimness, “except this, from last night,” and he sucks on Poe's neck and bites a little, so that it takes Poe a second to get his words back and say, “I do like that.”

“What else though?” More kisses, trailing down his neck and around to the base of his throat.

“Everything,” Poe says helplessly. “I like kissing, I like sucking cock. If you pin me down and take what you want from me I'll be yours forev--” Shit.

“You're yours,” Finn says, and Poe can hear the amusement tipping his mouth into a smile around the words, “but that's good to know. So if I wanna fuck you--”

“I'd love that.”

“And if I want you to fuck me--”

“Love that too,” Poe says, and slides his hands down to Finn's ass, feeling like he ought to make some more concrete contribution to the conversation. “Seriously, I can't think of anything you could do to me that I wouldn't like.”

“About that,” Finn says, and his whole body stops, ceases the gentle lively way it's been moving against Poe's, so that Poe stops too, uncertain. “If we—if you fuck me, can you—facing me? Not behind me?”

“Yeah. Sure. Of course.”

“It's a long story, I don't wanna--”

“You don't need to explain, you don't need a reason or anything,” Poe says, trying not to think about what the reason might be. “But you can explain! If you want to. Only what you want, nothing you don't want.” He waits for Finn to kiss him again, and he doesn't have to wait long: these kisses are more eager and generous in a way Poe wouldn't have thought was possible, a weight lifted, a gate opened. “That's what I want,” Finn says into his mouth.

“You want me to fuck you?”

“Fuck me, kiss me, look at me. I wanna see your face.”

“It's dark,” Poe says, because he really _cannot_ stop himself, but Finn just laughs and kisses him all over his face and says, “See it like this, then.”

Even their fumbles and false steps—Finn's knee nearly catching Poe in the groin in an unsexy way, how he has to take Poe's hand and guide it into a better rhythm, the adjustments they have to make for Finn's back and Poe's leg—feel like necessary moves in a long arc toward one another. It's chilly, so they take their pants off and keep their shirts and heavy sweaters on. This makes Poe glad it's as dark as it is, he must look _ridiculous,_ but he can't pretend to care about that for more than a second with Finn's dick hard and hot against his thigh, Finn's hands grabbing his head and forcing their mouths together, then guiding him downward, insistent pressure that he's only too happy to comply with. When Finn's cock fills his mouth he's the one who moans, and Finn stirs up into it, crushing against Poe's soft palate and choking him before he gets the right angle and opens his throat, hears Finn's grunts and sighs distantly over the pounding of blood in his ears.

He could do this all night, the ache in his jaw be damned, but after a while Finn hauls him up—he can feel his pulse in his lips as they kiss some more—and asks, “You wanna be inside me or what?”

“So much. You got lube in that pack of yours? Or anything sort of vaguely lube-like?”

“Shit. No, I don't think so.” Finn sits up and rummages through the pack, testing its contents by touch. “Not a damn thing. Some strategist I am.”

“There's always spit.”

“Ugh.” It's obviously an involuntary reaction.

Poe laughs and pulls him back down. “Some rugged revolutionary,” he teases, then wonders fleetingly if that's maybe a little much, but Finn's full weight on him, crushing the breath out of him, feels so good that he decides it must be okay. “What instead? Blow you some more? Something else?” He can't move much, but he can grind up into that sweet spot between Finn's dick and his thigh, so he does that, gets his reward in the form of Finn grinding back and breathing hot and harsh into Poe's neck. “Touch me,” he says in Poe's ear.

“You gotta lift a up a little. Or turn on your side or something.” They roll sideways, a stone or tree root digging into Poe's ribs under the groundsheet. He gets a good grip and moves his hand like Finn showed him before, licks his palm and starts over, wraps his hand around both of them together and gets an extremely gratifying throaty sound out of Finn, slides and grips and twists, gives up on getting the motion and pressure Finn likes and the motion and pressure he likes at the same time. He inches down till Finn's dick is back in his mouth where it belongs and one of Finn's thighs is tensed over his shoulder, trapping him there.

He gets one arm loose, fists Finn's cock at the base, spits on his own fngers, and kisses the top of Finn's thigh. “Can I put my fingers in you at least?”

“At _least,”_ Finn says, amusement shading off into a groan as Poe starts to open him. “Fuck, that's good.” Poe fingers him and sucks and swallows, warm and sloppy, till Finn's dick thickens and hardens and shoots. Come drools a little out of the side of Poe's mouth that's closer to the ground.

He sits up, mouth glazed with it, the long curve of Finn's thigh and torso just visible in the dimness. He wishes he could make his pupils wider, take everything in, see how Finn's looking at him—he can't tell. “Come over here,” Finn says, “why are you all the way up there?”

So Poe lies back down beside him and Finn kisses him deliberately, long sweeps of tongue taking his own come back into his mouth, and his warm rough hand closes around Poe's dick and jacks him hard and fast a couple of times and that's all it takes.

Finn's come is still smeared across Poe's face and his own is definitely sprayed over his sweater, and all the various rolling around has left him lying on his bad side. He adjusts to lie on his back and pulls Finn close again. “I'm happy,” Finn says in a wondering voice. “Poe, I'm so happy,” and then makes a choking sound against Poe's neck, which is suddenly damp.

“Hey,” Poe says. “Sweetheart, hey,” the endearment falling into his mouth like water into water. He loosens his grip so Finn can move away if he wants to, but he hangs on tighter. Poe strokes his shoulders and the nape of his neck, firm pressure like he's smoothing the creases away. Finn cries quietly, just a sound and a tremor here and there, and the name, _Ayere._

“Oh,” Poe says, his heart contracting, “it's okay, cry for him, you miss him, it's okay.” He isn't _jealous,_ exactly, not jealous of a dead man, but he sort of wishes he was dead too, because even in Poe's arms, Finn is alone with his grief, and he knows how that is, how it's impossible for anyone to join you there. He kisses the top of Finn's head and keeps his mouth there, short-cropped hair rough against his lips, till Finn quiets and settles against him and says, “Thank you.”

Whether it's about the sex or the holding or the permission or all three, it's probably the only thing he could have said that wouldn't have made Poe feel either more helpless and distant or like Finn was humoring him, and he says, “You're welcome,” meaning it: Finn is welcome to whatever Poe has that he could possibly want. They separate to unroll the blankets and get under them, and plaster up against each other again, still a little damp in places.

 

 

_Day 11/Now_

 

Finn half-steps, half-crawls out of the tent and sees Poe dressed and barefoot and frowning at his sweater—sees the back of him first, holding the sweater at arm's length, consternation in his posture; sees the sunlight looped in the loops of his hair. He should be warier, maybe, of the wave of love that rises in him at the sight, but he just fucking doesn't have that kind of time. He steps up to Poe and hugs him from behind, saying, “Hey.”

“Morning.” Finn doesn't miss the brief tension before Poe lowers his arms and relaxes back against him, saying, “Still not a mistake?”

“Still.” They stand like that for a minute, maybe, long enough for the world to feel like it's falling into place around them. Finn simultaneously knows this is an illusion and thinks it might be the realest thing he's ever felt, a recognition of something true: a galaxy where this is happening is a galaxy he wants to be in. He kisses the back of Poe's neck and says, “There's a little solar stove in one of the packs, and some tea. You want some tea?”

“How's our water supply?”

“We should be hitting the river around midday. If you wanna wash that sweater, too.” He lets Poe go and squats to assemble and position the stove, a little duraluminum box with reflective innards that gather and concentrate sunlight. He can feel Poe's eyes on him; it's nice. “You used to have caf every morning, back on D'Qar. You miss it?”

“I thought I would, but I don't. I must've detoxed while I was laid up from the crash. Haven't missed it at all.”

“That's good,” Finn says, stirring the herbs and water together, “because there are two Messengers working in the system that produces one of the main ingredients, and if all goes well there'll be a shortage pretty soon.”

Poe doesn't say anything for a minute, but sits down near Finn, takes the cup, sips. “Right, I get it,” he says. “It's everything, right, not just the--'the enemy.' We do know that, you know, we're not _totally_ politically shortsighted.”

“Didn't say you were.” Finn takes the cup of tea back. Yrui knows the local herbs that go into it and made up packets for everyone, and it tastes like camp to him now, bringing with it the smell of smoke even when there's no smoke. “The trick is figuring out what you wanna keep, and if you can keep it or if it's too mixed in with the stuff you want to change--”

“And that's probably different in every system--”

“Right, more or less, but then there's also the stuff everyone needs all the time, like food. Or if you're a member of one of the big cafenin-processing houses, there's like a pride to it, even if you're one of the people doing the shittiest work—that's what the dispatches say, anyway, I haven't been there—but every place has something like that. And at first we thought, well, people don't _need_ that, it's just one of the things they think they need--”

“And then you realized that if you don't listen to what people think is going on, you don't have a prayer of showing them what else is going on.”

“Right, or what _could_ go on. How did you know that?”

Poe dismantles the stove, which is cool enough to touch, and stows it. “I don't know,” he says. “People? Just—listening to people, watching what they do?”

“You make it sound normal,” Finn says, “but it took me years to figure it out, and a lot of times it was just luck when people didn't die because I didn't.”

“Well, it took me years too,” Poe says, “you just weren't around for most of 'em.” He ties the sweater around his waist, crusty side out. “Should we get going?”

Finn lets Poe set the pace uphill, and they don't talk much until they reach the river. He wonders if Poe's irritated with him or just concentrating on walking or something else, figures it'll reveal itself in time.

In his mind he goes over where everyone is now: Yetta and Meilo and the kids fitting their way into the village, relatively easy. The Yeon contingent, about a third of the way there, going at Yrui's pace, probably with Estetty scouting ahead in her hoverchair, impatient. The people already working in Yeon, laying groundwork, weaving themselves like new circuitry through the old circuitry of the city's systems and exchanges, tapping in, bypassing, storing up, shorting out. Fevrier and Bol and Ousmane heading for the train station to make their way to the capital, the center of the danger, where the survivors of Finn and Darapar and Juz and Ayere's work are smoldering still in the walls of the city.

He's the most worried about the capital, feels least balanced on its turning. He should probably go there instead of Yeon once Poe makes his rendezvous. The imminence of Poe's departure digs at him, dismays him, and he recognizes it as a distraction, something his mind is turning toward so he won't have to think about what to do after it. He thinks, deliberately, _I'll miss him so much, I love having him here,_ and moves his mind to what he knows about the capital as it is now and what he needs to find out in order to be useful.

They come up on the river suddenly, running brown and low, a few rivulets plaiting themselves in the sun over a little fall. Poe gets stiffly down to drink and Finn steps up to help him, and thinks for a minute Poe's going to shake him off angrily. But he accepts the counterweight of Finn's arm, drinks, stands again, says, “Sorry.”

“I'm sorry you're hurting,” Finn says.

“It's not that. Or no, it's that, but it's—I hate--” He stops. “I should be over it,” he says. “I should get over it.”

“Needing help?” Finn asks. “Or being mad about--”

“That, yeah.”

Finn crouches and drinks and fills their water bottles, and Poe gets down beside him, still awkwardly, and soaks his sweater in the river water, scrubbing it against the edge of the rock they're standing on. Wrings it out, lays it on a nearby rock to dry, leans his shoulder against Finn's. He says in a low voice, “I don't want to mess up my time with you.”

Finn kisses the side of his head. “You're not.”

“Should I just leave this sweater here? How far are we from the campsite?” They're going back a different way than they came down, and all the landmarks Poe carefully noted on the descent are useless. But he doesn't want to mess up the time, and when Finn stands and reaches down to pull him up two-handed, he bites back a comment about his own decrepitude that he's itching to make. It helps that Finn pulls hard, so their chests bump together and a messy, toothy kiss is the logical next step.

He drapes the sweater over the rolled-up tent, hoping the sun will dry it before it makes the canvas smell, and follows Finn up the trail, which is only about one medium-sized person wide. The view from here is obviously incredible—he could watch Finn walk ahead of him all day and never tire of it—and the forest smells good and the sunlight feels nice, and he tries to concentrate on those things instead of the pain in his hip and the tangle of thoughts in his head: having to leave, and what kind of plan to make with Finn before he does, and the finicky business of getting back to base without leaving a trail in either direction—he used to get a kick out of it, and still does if he's confident he's being tailed, but it's dreary and annoying when he only _might_ be.

Poe's long been out of the habit of thinking far ahead. Enough to plan a campaign or a mission, sure, but not enough to think about what happens if he makes it back. He's good, but it doesn't always matter how good you are. When he imagines what _could_ happen, it's how a run might go, or a handoff, or a fact-finding expedition—nothing beyond that. He's done more thinking about the end of the war, how it might feel, how people might live, in the last ten days than in the last ten years; it sounds stupid even in his head, but it hadn't occurred to him to want anything from it.

Since joining Finn and the rest of them, he's caught a glimpse not so much of how he wants the outward trappings of his life to be—if he never again attempts to farm anything it'll be too soon, and keeping machinery running is fine but not exactly thrilling—but how he might like his life to _operate,_ to work in conjunction with other lives. What did Finn say earlier, about what to keep and what to change? And how to tease that all out in search of a feeling your life mostly doesn't let you feel, like a bar of music you once heard over the noise of a crowd?

The work of actually making it possible, both the clinics-and-kitchens side and the armed-takeover side, that part he understands fine. But knowing what you're working toward—what _could_ go on, Finn said—how to know that, how to hear it? He's been fighting to end the First Order. But if there's no First Order, there's no Resistance. And if there's no Resistance—

This is the point at which they break from the trail into the clearing, and the burnt emptiness hits Poe in the gut for the second time. The body of the attacker is still there, stinking in the sun, and they don't have the tools to bury them with; it must have rained up here, because the ashes are damp and sour.

“We can't just wait here,” Poe says firmly, and Finn agrees. They do place one of Estetty's portable beacons to guide the incoming ship down, but don't turn it on yet, since the ship's not due till the next day. They make a kind of cairn for the corpse out of movable debris, charred bits of houses and furniture and machinery—Finn tells Poe to rest, and he badly needs to, but he can't just let Finn do this by himself.

Later, sooty and sore-handed, they go back to the river and wash, and lay their clothes out to dry, including the still-damp sweater. There's a small stretch of bank that's all grasses and low plants, and it looks soft, but Poe eyes it with misgivings. “If I sit on that, will bugs crawl up my ass?”

Finn laughs. “From bugs, your ass is safe.”

Poe makes a face that he means to be suggestive but is probably just ridiculous. “Well, I don't want to protect it from anybody else around here.” They scramble onto the bank, and Poe sits down—the grass _feels_ like bugs—and tries to get comfortable. He says, “You seem happy.”

“Yeah, I am. I told you that.”

“But right after that--”

Finn lies down with his head on Poe's thigh. “I knew you had me, it was okay.” He shrugs, the motion traveling through his body to Poe's where they're touching, and once again Poe feels like the recipient of a million gifts, so lucky that his flesh can barely contain it. He touches Finn's face, smooths his brow, traces his lips. “You know what we should do,” he says.

“I have a few ideas, yeah.”

“Before that. Before my ride gets here, too. We should each make a wish list. Targets you want us to hit, places it would be good for us if the Messengers did a little prep work there.”

“Ugh, _fine,”_ Finn says, and gets up grumbling to get his battered datapad out of the pack, and that's how they end up naked on a riverbank talking about strategic locations and destabilization and supply lanes. Finn notes Poe's wish list on the datapad, in his own cipher, and Poe keeps Finn's in his head, memorizing it the way he might a song.

Twice they stop and stay quiet for a minute, when a shift in the forest sounds makes them think they might have human company. The lists slow down, with longer pauses between each item, and the sun is dropping; soon it'll move away from their patch of riverbank. Finn lays his datapad aside firmly and takes hold of Poe equally firmly, pulling him close first and then laying him down inexorably with an arm under his shoulders. True to form, this has Poe half-hard before his shoulder blades hit the ground, and Finn's sloppy tongue-kisses and delicious weight pinning him down and sharp little hip thrusts get him the rest of the way there. He doesn't ever want this to stop, doesn't want any of this to be further away than arm's reach--

“You're thinking about leaving,” Finn says, arching up a little to look him in the face.

“Only 'cause I wanna stay so bad.” It's glib, and true, and not true enough to actually keep him there. Finn just looks down at him with that beautiful luminous face, unlined still except for that one little vertical between his brows and the faintest, the very faintest traces on either side of his mouth. Doesn't say anything else about leaving; doesn't ask Poe to stay. Holds the look a long moment before bending his mouth to Poe's again, then moving down and taking Poe's cock right to the back, sucking long and wet while Poe gasps his name and goes rigid and comes for him.

Finn stays there for a minute, getting his breath back and licking the last drops out. Poe shudders and strokes his shoulders but doesn't otherwise move, so when Finn's good and ready he kisses his way back up, ending at the corner of Poe's still-slack mouth until he kisses back. Finn fits himself into the join of Poe's hip and thigh. “Yeah,” Poe murmurs, “that's it, that's good, come all over me,” and Finn surges forward helplessly, a long free fall, landing with his lips bruising against Poe's shoulder, and resting there.

He just simply and truly and totally doesn't want to do anything else but this, ever again. Finn knows himself well enough to know that that sex makes things feel simple when they're not, that the work he has to do and the world he's trying to build will reassert themselves and call to him. He knows Poe wouldn't be content either with a life that consisted of blow jobs on a riverbank while other people fought and suffered—that's part of where this feeling's coming from, knowing that the man he's with in this moment can only stand to stay in it a little longer, will feel the same need he does to stand up and return to what they've promised to do.

But this is a promise too, a purpose, a reason. He wants to mark it, but he can't say _Stay with me,_ because he doesn't want Poe to stay, not really. Wanting and not wanting at the same time: he's learned how to do that, these last years. He says, “You,” and stops, presses his cheek to Poe's, tries to think of it like he would the beginning of a campaign. What can he offer, what's true and essential, what does he want Poe to know? Poe who's breathing into his hair now, quiet, holding him close. Poe, who he couldn't have predicted, couldn't have planned for, not then and not now. He says, “I love you,” because it means what he means, and nothing else comes close.

Poe breathes in sharply, his chest lifting Finn a little, and breathes out slowly. He says, “That's what this is, isn't it.”

“It's what I'm _doing,_ ” Finn says.

“Yeah,” Poe says. “Me too.”

Eventually they get up, stiffly, and splash with more river water to rinse off, curling into themselves a little at the cooler air on wet skin. The clothes they laid out to dry are still warm from sun and rocks, but the sky's color is deepening and the Dancers are rising, framed in the gap in the trees that the river makes. “Nice,” Poe says.

“Rohaye, down in the village, she told me last year that about four generations ago, there used to be six, and now there's seven. Something about the way the gravity works, the gravity of the planet and then the gravity of the moons, they actually pulled something in, maybe a comet, she said, and now they all move around each other. There's another one that astronomers think might get pulled in, in about ten more generations, give or take.”

“A little on the nose, huh?” Poe kisses him, a spot of warmth.

“Maybe,” Finn says, “but I feel like on a different planet we'd have found something else to look at and feel good about, you know? If you know what you need, and you go looking for it, you'll find it, if somebody doesn't kill you first.”

“Words to live by. Should we bother setting up the tent?”

“Sure, but if they're still on schedule they could get in tonight, so let's keep watching the sky.”

“Looking for anything in particular?”

“Blue running lights, two pair, with one out on the left wing. That's either our signal, or a sign that someone beat our signal out of one of our people, or a sign that one of our people stooled us out. We won't know till they're on the ground.”

“I was wondering about that,” Poe says. “How you managed to...you seem surprisingly...I'm trying to say 'not paranoid' without saying it.”

“You know what it is,” Finn says, “you take precautions, sure, and you weigh the risks, and you get ready for things to be bad if they're gonna be bad, but honestly, the way we've gotten as far as we have is by trusting people. At least to some extent. I mean, you do undercover work, so you know--you check what they tell you, but eventually you have to act on something.”

“You're not gonna find me arguing with that,” Poe says, thinking of a hundred grimy meetings in a hundred grimy cities, but thinking too of the moment when he first saw Finn's face and said, "We're gonna do this," and never looked back, not once.

“There was this one thing I read when I was in jail, it was supposed to be the sayings of a rebel leader who died fighting the Empire, in one of the first Death Star attacks.” They've been putting up the tent as they've been talking; Finn settles back to the grass now and pulls Poe down beside him. “Whoever wrote it down seemed to be pretty on board with him, and he said a lot of stuff we've used, especially about how to organize cells and pass on information. But when you read these—I guess they're transcripts of things he said—you can tell how the paranoia was fucking with him. He was thinning out the ranks too hard, he missed some important chances because he didn't trust the source, he killed his own people with not that much evidence, he used a—best I can tell is that it was kind of a living version of an interrogation droid. I always think about him when I'm deciding whether to let somebody in.”

“Like me,” Poe says, trying to get his hand between Finn's ass and the ground, and groping to make his point.”

Finn snorts. “Sure, you know, it's a big decision, to open up to—you know what, I'm having trouble running with the joke here.”

“You're doing fine,” Poe assures him, “but it's okay if you can't keep up. I'm an expert.”

“I better practice, then, for,” Finn says, and stops.

Poe takes Finn's face in his free hand and turns it for a kiss, a long slow one, long enough and deep enough for his heart to speed up and his dick to harden just a little bit. He tries to say with his mouth and his hands and his whole body _We'll be together again,_ because his body believes it, or at least can't conceive of a galaxy without it, and his mind doesn't want to make promises he might not get to keep. “I wanna live in the world you're making,” he says, “help you make it, live in it with you. Whatever I have to do, to do that--”

By the time they spot the blue lights, all but two of the Dancers have dipped out of sight behind the trees, and there's a bank of cloud rolling in. They make their way back to the burnt clearing, since that's where the crew of three would've expected to land and where the homing beacon is. They stand wrapped in the smell of ashes and each other's arms as the craft makes its descent.

“This is a tactic,” Finn says softly. “If they see me kissing you they'll figure I've vetted you already and you're safe to come on board.”

“Good thinking,” is all Poe can say. He knows he has to leave, but he's not ready, he wants another kiss, another night, just _more._

“Find me,” Finn says, exactly the way he said _Touch me_ the night before. “Once you're done with your part of it, come find me. I gotta go talk to these guys, catch them up on what's been happening here. I'll give you the high-sign when it's okay to come over and meet them.” The little craft settles a safe distance away from them, and the hatch opens, hissing pressurized air. Finn holds Poe away gently, looks at his face as if to fix it in his mind. Then he turns to the two figures silhouetted against the ship's light, walks to meet them.


End file.
